June 25, 2013

Being the most critical component of your marketing communications, your message is also one of the most challenging tasks in the entire marketing process.

How do you choose the best message to describe who you are and how you help clients like them?

What words will help potential clients understand how they will benefit from hiring you?

Equally important, how do you slide easily into preparing your message instead of getting bogged down figuring our how to start?

These questions were triggered by the following comment recently posted on my blog:

“…I was curious to find out how you center yourself and clear your mind before writing. I’ve

had trouble clearing my thoughts in getting my ideas out there.

“I do enjoy writing but it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes are usually lost simply just trying to

figure out how to begin.”

Being about a quarter of the way through a large writing project, it seems like a good time to pause and reflect on the challenge of figuring out how to begin writing something new.

Even though it’s been some time since I got stuck at the early stages of some new writing, I do understand and appreciate the frustration.

From my experience, it’s easier to center yourself and clear your mind before starting to write.

Clarify why you are writing: what do you want accomplish? If for example you are writing a marketing piece, what do you want the reader to do after reading your message? …go to your website? …contact you? …something else?

When you have clarified what you want accomplish, turn the issue over to your imagination, allowing it to help you visualize your desired outcome. Perhaps you will visualize the reader going to your website or picking up the phone to call you.

Once comfortable with what you see in your imagination, put on your writer’s hat and go with the flow.

Instead of trying to figure out how to begin, you will be more likely to struggle to keep up with the flow of ideas.

Whenever I have used visualization as an early component of writing, not only has it eliminated so-called writer’s block, it has also generated some great results.

There are probably as many ways figuring out how begin a new piece of writing as there are writers.